Users want what they want, and
even if they can’t specify it in advance, they know it when they
experience it. These are IT’s customers. How to make them happy?
The
easy answer is to feed them services to consume: network-derived
datasets and communications functions pulled from inside or outside the
firewall that allow the workers to get their jobs done faster, better,
with less eyestrain or brainstrain.
And as we know, when
users are left to their own devices, finding and importing outside
services and functionalities are exactly what they do, regardless of IT
security or governance.
“It may in the end be easier for evangelists to focus on services: this is something everybody gets. When Dovetail CRM
comes into an Amdocs Clarify install and presents the department with a
myriad of new functions, some of the best magic is happening through
services consumed by the thin client, either though Dovetail’s huge
library of APIs for Clarify or through web services.
“Agents find they can open or amend cases through
email, and make Ad Hoc queries on the fly in an open-case situation. IT
finds it can easily customize a particular application for a unique
function using Dovetail Web Services. These are simple yet crucial
business processes that the business people understand intimately: it’s
not a great step to talk about services in the same breath as
processes.” – Services By Any Other Name
The rise of SaaS, as we noted again recently, provides a way for business users to bypass IT and bring a range of services to worker desktops. But nothing should bypass IT.
There
should be a golden rule stating that every new move forward that IT
makes should also – beyond its technical advantage – bring the business
side closer together with IT. And IT of course, should be the entity
adopting this rule.
Dion Hinchcliffe in his continuing
explorations of the two worlds of services – their consumption, and the
architecture that enables their beneficial compositions – has described
the technological environment in which most business users in the
enterprise have to operate:
“The fact is, our IT systems are still largely
unexploitable and unreachable until someone makes them available in
format easily consumable within our browsers and by the vast landscapes
of partners and suppliers that exist in the giant network cloud of the
Internet.” – The story of Web 2.0 and SOA continues – Part 1
The advent of Ajax has transformed the user
interface, both in the Web browser and the application window.
Asynchronous data retrieval from remote sources is a formidable
alternative to native code, especially to the knowledge worker whose
greatest need is process NOW.
The
immediate gratification brought by the right services can be a large
force subverting the focus on long-range planning, maybe as a good
thing, maybe not. For example, SOA and SaaS have services as their common ground, and it is becoming common to hear on-demand services providers claiming to deliver SOA on demand. But are they really?
Caution
would suggest that anything to do with architecture should involve
architects. So the question arises, how great is the jeopardy of all
the legacy systems that IT is charged with developing and securing,
when increasingly better services are piped in from the Web? Are
on-demand services eroding the essential architecture of the enterprise?
We’ll continue this look tomorrow.
